Perhaps you’ll recall my previous coverage of Gamania Digital Entertainment’s social MMO Lucent Heart—when I lauded the developers for their ability to create a highly integrated, social gameplay with elements designed to bring people together for doing a lot more than pummeling monsters into the dust with sizzling magic and cold iron. Well, Gamania has done it again and during their version 5.0 update, SCAENA, have brought even more social to an already impressive feature set.
The first and brightest addition of the SCAENA update is the addition of a dance creator to the social-friendly dating MMO. It can be activated by addressing the emotes tab and opening the dance creator interface.
The dance choreography in this expansion is extremely complex, with over twenty possible animations. Using the creator, a user can string them together into series sequences of dance moves that are set to music chosen by the creator. Each of the sequences can be no more than 20 seconds with as many as 10 dance moves per segment. This opens up a great deal of customization for any dance.
Players interested in writing their own dances can also use their own music—however, it doesn’t stream it via the game to other nearby players (but it will play the same song if they also have the same mp3 attached to their game.) For those who don’t have music of their own to fiddle with, Lucent Heart has a series of already-loaded music that all users can use as well.
During my tour and demonstration in the grand city of Thereall, the City of Peace, I used Goth Girls by MC Frontalot for my dance tune.
Once dancing, your character will begin a choreographed performance to the music that all other players in the area can see and as part of the expansion they can join in. All they have to do is interact with your character and select, “Initiate.” They’ll immediately fall into step.
As I danced, no less than three other people wandered over and fell into a dancing formation with me.
The Duel: 1-2-3 Dance!
Lucent Heart has proven itself as a game that’s taking the dating motif and the social MMO to its logical end and with the addition of the dancing expansion they’ve added a sort of dancing “PvP.”
In a normal MMO, this would mean fighting and killing, but in Lucent Heart this means what essentially boils down to competitive DDR. You can challenge anyone, anytime to a dance off (although I’d suggest doing it someplace safe from monsters) and it will trigger a minigame that plays music, causes your avatars to dance, and throws Simon Says arrows at you.
The object of the game is to hit the required direction-keys as the progress bar advances and to strike the spacebar when another red bar reaches a star. It works in a similar vein to many music-based button-pressing competition games such as Rockband and Guitar Hero.
Except, as this is on the PC, we’re going to be pressing arrow-keys.
More Regions and Bosses for the Intrepid Explorer at Heart
The new SCAENA update isn’t all ballerina booties and tutus; however, there’s also been an addition of several new areas and bosses to the already expansive countryside.
Visit the stormy peaks of Mt. Destiny, brave rain and snow to visit Misty Storm, Titan Ruin, or Frozen Imprisonment. If you’re into interesting takes on ancient Greek masonry, you can also set foot on the Haphaestus Tableland.
Just be sure to bring your friends, these places in the wilderness are not for the faint of heart, they contain terrible foes who will take teamwork and epic friendship to overcome. In real Lucent Heart social style.
